I think Turchin percieves the matter better than the author.
For some reason the author presumes everyone who decides to to study physics should not veer from this path or else they have failed. This is an extraordinary queer point of view.
As such a "failed" physicist myself now in software, having a degree in physics makes me actually quite malleable for all sorts of fun things, and my studies have indoctrinated me to basically view everything as an unknows system, that can be modelled even though current models don't exist.
This is very usefull!
It's great to have this sort of dialogue, but the n physicists doing programming have found a niche for themselves and their talents. I would not call that failing.
The other side of the coin is that should science be better supported? Instill insight and ambition to students? None of those are bad things from the point of view of the discpline.
But attacking the argument from the point of view that "everyone who started studying physics, and are now doing something else signal a failure of the system" smells very much of propagating a view that people at the young age when they decide their university program should have a great understanding of the world, their position in it, and absolute certainty that physics is the best way to spend their working life. Which most 18-20 year olds probably don't have (well, I did not for one). And having thus chosen a profession out of poor understanding of the complete picture, should stick to their decision and pull through, even though it seems to them other professions would be more suitable.
The author mixes the bag even more by off-the-cuff random judgment calls on the intrinsic human value of others labour, which never really results in a sane dialogue. The claim itself is incredibly elitist - "Optimizing an algorithm at Google has less human value than repeating an known experiment at a physics lab to dot the i:s on a well understood theory".
Physics is very important! But individual career choices are in a different category altogether. If you go and study physics and stick to it you might have ended up wasting your intellectual potential on hyped dead-ends like string theory . Now where is the benefit for mankind in that? (the comment is intended as a naughty swipe and I'm smirking while typing this).